What Actually Happens at an Internet Exchange
A plain explanation of what an internet exchange point actually is, how peering and route servers work, and why the culture around them stays deliberately boring and neutral.
Settlement-free peering runs on surprisingly little paperwork — most of the real vetting happens between people who've spent years running into each other at NOG meetings, not in a signed contract.
A plain explanation of what an internet exchange point actually is, how peering and route servers work, and why the culture around them stays deliberately boring and neutral.
On the LLM Gym's promotion gate — four pass-or-fail checks, no partial credit — and why a single weighted score was too easy to talk myself into.
On running unattended training jobs on your own hardware, and the adaptive pacing system that finally made it safe to stop checking.
A model that refuses ordinary requests is just as broken as one that gets them wrong, so the promotion gate in the gym now checks for both.
A checkpoint file sat in exactly the right folder with exactly the right rough size, and it still wasn't a checkpoint. Here's what "the file exists" was quietly failing to promise.
On teaching a background job to decide, without me watching, which giant training files are safe to delete, and the short list of things it can never touch.
In my home training rig, a new model doesn't get promoted for clearing some fixed score. It has to beat the current champion, on the same test set, the same day, under the same judge.
A held-out eval only means something if it stays untouched by training data, and it turns out there are a dozen boring, well-intentioned ways to break that without noticing.
On a home fine-tuning rig, a second model scores every candidate answer before it gets promoted. Here's what happened when I finally checked whether that judge could be trusted.